liquidthreads wikimania 2010
DESCRIPTION
MediaWiki currently uses an ad-hoc discussion system, which suffers from a poor workflow for common cases, a lack of tracking and instrumentation, and the imposition of onerous maintenance requirements for high-volume discussion pages. I present an alternative system, called LiquidThreads, which I have been working on with the assistance of the Wikimedia Foundation.TRANSCRIPT
Threaded Discussions on MediaWiki with LiquidThreads
Andrew Garrett, Wikimedia Foundation
The Status Quo• Discussion Pages are freeform wikitext pages.
• Advantages:
• Flexible
• Disadvantages:
• Common case workflow is non-obvious
• High-volume pages need bots for archival, other common operations
• Difficult to track, analyze
Design Goals
• Simple workflow for common cases
• Most maintenance happens by itself
• Rich notification and analysis built-in
• Slick, responsive interface
• Retain wiki-like flexibility
LiquidThreads
Current Deployments
• Translatewiki
• Strategic planning process
• English Wikinews
• Lots of external users
The future of LiquidThreads
• New staff assigned
• UI Refresh
• Gradually expanding test deployments.
• New features
Roadmap
• Next few weeks: New version deployed to a few small projects by request (Hungarian Wikipedia, Swedish Wikisource, ...).
• Next few months: interface updates
• Long-term: test deployments on larger sites
• Later: full scale deployment
